Charlotte Brontë grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors, where she and her brother and sisters invented imaginary kingdoms and filled thousands of pages of tiny hand-made books with their stories. She went to school at Roe Head, came back to teach there, worked as a governess, and in 1842 went to Brussels to study French and German. In 1846 she persuaded her sisters to publish a book of poems under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, because women were not encouraged to be writers. The next year she published Jane Eyre as Currer Bell, and it was an immediate success, with readers arguing over who the author could be. In her own preface she wrote that "conventionality is not morality," a defense of telling hard truths even when they made people uncomfortable. She went on to write Shirley in 1849 and Villette in 1853, was welcomed in London as a famous novelist, and in 1854 married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died in 1855, at 38.